Caught on Camera

Public Culture ESSAYS Caught on Camera Kevin Lewis O’Neill Carlos had pissed himself. That much was clear, but the pastor pushed the point, dragging his thumb and index finger across the surface of his smart phone until the image rubber- banded, bouncing back to fit the device’s zoom limit. A pair of soiled trousers filled the screen. “This photo,” the pastor whispered while tracing the image with his finger, “it’s a blessing. A testimony. It shows us the soul.”1 We spoke on the first floor of a Pentecostal drug rehabilitation center. These are informal, unregulated, and largely for- profit centers that keep pace with Guatemala’s growing rapprochement with crack cocaine. They warehouse users (often against their will) for months, sometimes for years. “Carlos is here,” the pastor added. “We found him in the streets. High on crack [piedra] and totally out of control.” He held his phone up to me: “Look at how dirty he is. That face. That filth. Those eyes.” The pastor then pinched the image, snapping the photo back to size, adding almost as an afterthought: “So we took him.” This essay explores the imbrication of taking photos and taking men, assess- ing not only the visual technologies that forge new forms of social surveillance 1. All interviews in this article come from fieldwork conducted in Guatemala City between 2011 and 2015 in and around Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. Basit Kareem Iqbal provided research assistance. Those I interviewed remain anonymous or are cited by pseudonym. In some cases, certain details (insignificant to the analysis) have been changed to protect the identities of certain people. That includes the use of composite scenes that contain elements from more than one situation. They accurately reflect actual events, but have been rearranged to preserve anonymity. Quotations are from recorded interviews or from detailed notes. All translations are my own. All images, edited to preserve anonymity, are published here with the subjects’ oral consent. Field- work was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Open Society Foundations, and the American Academy of Religion. This essay began as an invited talk at the Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Stanford University. I thank each of my hosts: Marie Griffith, Eric Hoenes del Pina, Thomas Klubock, and Graham Denyer- Willis. Public Culture 29:3 doi 10.1215/08992363-3869572 Copyright 2017 by Duke University Press 493 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture Public Culture but also the Christian ontology that prompts these pastors to see (and seize) drug users. Discernment is absolutely central to this story. But rather than a mode of aesthetic judgment, with philosophical concerns for beauty and taste, discernment as a Pentecostal practice distinguishes the truly repentant soul from all the rest.2 Rooted in scripture (1 Cor. 12:10) and based on a rather dramatic division between good and evil, discernment is the ability for Christians to appreciate the relative sincerity of a sinner, to perform what one theologian calls “a hermeneutics of life” (Yong 2004: 84). Taking up this divine gift, directors of drug rehabilitation centers arm them- selves with digital devices in hopes of reading the body for signs of the soul. It is an imperfect effort that generates vast archives of digital content. These are photographs and videos of users buying and selling, smoking and fiending, recov- ering and relapsing. A descendant of the missionary photograph, with shades of the nineteenth- century mug shot, these images constitute the drug user as a par- ticular type with a recognizable look (Smith 1999: 68). And while the body has long been a contested terrain upon which Christians distinguish the sinner from the saved (Griffith 2004), these images facilitate the literal arrest of their referent (Sekula 1986: 7). They underlie the user’s extrajudicial incarceration. “How long has Carlos been here?” I asked. “For months,” the pastor answered. “Has he ever been outside?” I wondered. “Not once,” he replied. On the outskirts of Guatemala City, amid extreme levels of biomedical inequal- ity, the discernment of digital images has become a technique of capture. The practice not only delinks surveillance from the state but also frames the former as more providential than panoptic. For while drug prohibition across the Americas has recently experienced a rush of new visual technologies, including body- worn camera systems, in- car camera technologies, and surveillance drones, Pentecos- tals in Guatemala City are far less concerned with comprehensive coverage than their state- affiliated counterparts are. “All I need is a photograph,” the pastor explained, “a single visual testimony [testimonio visual] to discern someone, to truly see them.” Blessed by the Holy Spirit, these pastors deploy an optics that currently organizes the outer edges of today’s war on drugs. The fundamental problem is that the image tends to overshadow most everything else — in ways that keep users such as Carlos locked up for months, sometimes for years. 2. The philosophy of aesthetic judgment is expansive and expanding. The contrast that I establish here is between a Pentecostal theology of discernment (Yong 2000) and a philosophical tradition of discernment largely organized around Immanuel Kant’s ([1790] 1928) notion of a judgment of taste. See, for example, the work of Monroe Beardsley (1958), Edmund Burke (1998), and Eddy Zemach (1995). 494 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture Captured Caught on Camera Shifts in US interdiction efforts have dramatically increased the availability of illicit drugs in Guatemala. In 2004, 10 percent of the cocaine produced in the Andes for the United States passed through Guatemala, while the rest sailed across the Caribbean (Gootenberg 2009). The numbers then flipped. By 2011, hugely militarized maritime blockades prompted traffickers to make Central America their principal transit route. Today planes, boats, and submarines ferry some 80 percent of US- bound cocaine along the Pacific coast to northern Gua- temala (UNODC 2012: 39). One effect of this flip has been a spike in the use of crack cocaine in Guatemala City (O’Neill 2014). Drug- trafficking countries, the literature notes, often become drug- consuming countries (Feilding and Giacom- ello 2013).3 A second effect, related to the first, is the proliferation of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers (O’Neill 2013).4 An extreme lack of social services drives the growth of these centers. Along- side the privatization of state enterprises, the liberalization of trade, and the relax- ation of government regulation, economic restructuring in postwar Guatemala has included the systematic disinvestment in public health. Less than 2 percent of Guatemala’s total health budget addresses issues of mental health, with its hos- pitals flatly denying medical service to those patients seeking support for sub- stance abuse (WHO 2011). The Roman Catholic Church has also proved crimi- nally impassive by self- consciously constituting itself over the past century as an erratic charitable entity. The church runs a detoxification center in Guatemala City for alcoholics. Expensive even by middle- class standards, the center has six beds. Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers, when taken in the aggregate, have an estimated six thousand beds. This radical disparity in cots mirrors equally dispro- portionate rates of conversion. Once overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, Guatemala is today as much as 60 percent Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2006).5 3. Guatemala’s continued rapprochement with crack cocaine begins with the fact that the move- ment of this drug comes with considerable logistics: equipment, labor, infrastructure, and security, for example. Traffickers pay for none of this in cash. Instead, they pay with cocaine, which actually holds very little value in Guatemala. There are simply not enough Guatemalans who can afford the drug. To turn cocaine into cash, laboratories mix the drug with baking soda to make crack cocaine and sell it throughout Guatemala City (Feilding and Giacomello 2013; UN Committee Against Tor- ture 2013). 4. These centers are not specific to Guatemala. They represent an emerging genre of captivity (IHRD 2009; UNHCHR 2009; Wolfe and Saucier 2010) seen throughout the world, including Mexico (Garcia 2014), Ecuador (Wilkinson 2013), Thailand (Pearshouse 2009), Cambodia (Human Rights Watch 2010), and even Philadelphia (Fairbanks 2009). 5. This subsection contains updated passages found in O’Neill 2014. 495 Published by Duke University Press Public Culture Public Culture More important than numbers, however, are the visceral truths that Pentecostal Christianity promises its people. They include the felt reality that salvation is real and hell is eternal. Another imperative also follows: radical change is possible. One effect of this faith has been a growing network of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. These sites warehouse users inside of onetime garages, factories, and apartment buildings. Each has been repurposed for rehabilitation with razor wire, steel bars, and iron gates. Inside pastors practice teoterapia, or “theological therapy.” This is a mash- up of Pentecostal theology, twelve- step programming, and self- help psychology. Its most basic assumption is that captivity will give way to conversion. It rarely does. Yet this bald fact has done nothing to slow the growth of these centers, and the reason is simple. These centers provide a practi- cal solution to a concrete problem. Drug use is up. State resources are down. And Pentecostalism is the discourse of change. Jesus saves. The net result is a shadow carceral system infused with Pentecostal imperatives not just about sin and salvation but also about who can be held against their will and why. It is a theological construction that carries considerable consequences.

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